This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application No. 2003-68609, filed on Oct. 2, 2003, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for supporting quality of service (QoS), and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for supporting QoS for respective subscriber classes for an Ethernet passive optical network (E-PON) are provided.
2. Description of the Related Art
With increasing demands for broadband multimedia including the Internet, the level of subscribers' requests for quality of service is also moving upwards. In particular, with widespread multimedia services, services requiring real-time processing and higher bandwidths are increasing and the types are also becoming more diversified. In order to support the requirements of subscribers of multimedia services, QoS (quality of service) technology has been introduced.
QoS is a performance measure indicating the quality of transmission of a transmission system and the usage degree of a service, and means a technology which specifies service classes according to the degree of guaranteeing quality of connection service requested by a subscriber, and continuously guarantees the level of quality of service enough to satisfy a subscriber in each of the specified service classes.
At present, a number of communication systems apply a variety of algorithms and provide QoS according to subscriber class. However, this kind of support of QoS according to subscriber class has a limit that the support is provided to only ports directly connected to the communication system itself. That is, when a port desired to be supported for QoS is located at a remote place as in an E-PON system, there is a problem that QoS according to subscriber class cannot be supported well enough. This is because in an E-PON, an optical line termination (OLT) system is located in a central office (CO) of a communication carrier and a plurality of optical network units (ONUs) in different remote places are connected to one OLT system such that the OLT system cannot figure out the Internet protocol (IP) address of each subscriber port of the ONU systems.